You think you’ve got problems?
We’ve been presented a number of women’s apartments on theater stages recently. In Request Sa Radyo, both Lea Salonga and Dolly de Leon wander through a tidily kept apartment in New York or New Jersey, cleaning things on the daily. And in Sandbox Collective’s Tiny Beautiful Things, Iza Calzado dwells in a less-tidy home that matches her magulo state of mind while crafting responses to strangers who write in to her inherited advice column.
Those strangers show up in her apartment somewhat as apparitions: people whose voices she can hear, as they raid her refrigerator, make themselves at home on her furniture, and occasionally fold laundry. Mostly they talk about their problems. And Cheryl, who goes by the pen name “Sugar,” talks about hers.
Tiny Beautiful Things, under the direction of Jenny Jamora, meets the difficult task of making a stream of spoken letters add up to drama, through lighting, subtly interspersed music, and excellent turns from (on the night we watched) Rody Vera, Brian Sy and Regina De Vera as the letter writers/readers.
And of course, Calzado, whose performance moves through enough emotional stages that her fellow actors seemed on the verge of tears by the final “coming out” scene where she reveals her identity.
Strayed, aside from being a successful novelist and essayist, has had more than her share of bad life experiences—sexual abuse, heroin abuse, etc.—but she’s chosen to own them all, remaining open to grief and forgiveness and the gamut of human experience.
Calzado walks a tightrope between self-doubting whether she can actually give people advice, to finding a voice within herself to connect with the many anonymous people writing into her anonymous “Sugar.”
Her responses, drawn from her own life, become cautionary lessons to readers, increasingly dark and dramatically rapt. That’s when Calzado shines the most.
What Tiny Beautiful Things feels like is a collective therapy session—apt for The Sandbox Collective, which so often details trauma onstage—and there couldn’t be a more apt vehicle for its 10th season closer.
But it got me thinking about why so many people are flocking to the theater now in Manila. Sure, there was that surge, after COVID, leading people back to live stages. But perhaps it’s also that a younger generation wants a fourth screen in their lives—after their phones, laptops and TVs—through which to experience things. The stage is the place where it all feels a bit more visceral.
But what we learn from Tiny Beautiful Things is that, no matter how messy your life is or what problems you face, there’s definitely somebody whose life is waaaaaay more messed up than yours. It’s all a matter of perspective. “You’re making this about yourself,” one advice seeker complains after Sugar, sitting at her laptop, launches into another monologue about something analogous that happened to her. And most of the time, in Tiny Beautiful Things, she’s right: her problems trump theirs, so maybe she’s had enough experience to dole out life lessons.
All I know is that it takes a lot of chutzpah to give advice to strangers. Strayed has it, she’s earned it at least, and Tiny Beautiful Things, though it’s not exactly a “drama” (there’s no discernible three-part arc; the letters are almost interchangeable), it does offer subtle character development for Sugar in a way that’s funny, human, and often touching.
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Tiny Beautiful Things runs until Dec. 8 at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Black Box Theater, Circuit Makati. Friday shows at 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday shows at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets available at Ticket2Me (bit.ly/tinybeautifulmnl) or contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] or +63917 152 5560.
